Worker Wealth
For years, leading this company meant being buffeted. One season we’d have more clients than caregivers and scramble to cover every shift; the next we’d have more caregivers than work and watch good people’s hours and paychecks shrink. Those swings land on people: a caregiver who counted on 32 hours and got 20, and a family waiting for support.
The wind has steadied. Gently but steadily, it has pushed us forward as our waitlist and demand have grown. After several quarters of growth, we’ve had a full quarter with a waiting list.
Leading in plenty is different: it offers what scarcity doesn’t, time to lay down structure before the winds turn again.
We are an organization built and run by caregivers, and we’ve learned caregivers need three things: (1) a caring and supportive community, (2) a consistent, reliable schedule, and (3) the highest possible hourly wage. The first we have built and keep growing. The second and third depend on business volume: you cannot promise steady hours without steady demand, or raise wages without the work to fund them. Now the volume is here, constant and growing.
So rather than ride the growth the usual way, frantically adding admin staff and hiring every caregiver who applies, we’re asking a sharper question: how do we scale to grow the third thing, the wage, while continuing to provide care grounded in loving-kindness?
The usual answer to more volume is more overhead: more billing, more paperwork, more staff and managers to oversee them. Every one of those salaries sits between the money coming in and the caregiver’s paycheck. Let that layer grow with revenue, and it eats the worker’s wage, the money meant for the people doing the actual work.
The talk around AI is about reducing headcount to increase shareholder wealth. We plan to use it to grow worker wealth. Same tools, different aims.
Our office is small. Peter MacCorquodale, Kiyo Phelan and Andrea Pacheco Gabaldon have supported our administration together for 25 years, from the building and sale of one company to the start of this one. They chose or built the systems we operate with today. They are experienced and skilled, devoted to this work and to each other.
So we’re adding standard, off-the-shelf AI tools, different from the custom solutions we’ve been designing with researchers from Harvard and Tulane for caregivers. This is the everyday kind, available to anyone; we’re trying Claude Cowork. Its first job is one Kiyo knows well: sorting and delivering long-term care insurance documentation, which takes her about 20 hours a month today. If we triple in size, as we expect to over the next couple of years, that task would pass 60 hours a month and likely mean hiring someone just to keep up. We think Cowork can instead shrink this task to about two hours a month, and hold it there as we grow.
Consider the dollars. The wages for a 60-hour-a-month assistant at $22 an hour come to about $1,320 a month. Claude Cowork costs about $100. The roughly $1,200 a month we don’t spend, nearly $15,000 a year, never has to become overhead. It can go where we promised it would: into caregivers’ wages. And this is a single task. We expect to find many more.
We are intentional in everything we do; this is not a scramble. It’s a skilled team, a quarter-century deep, using a rare alignment of steady demand, healthy cash flow, and capable new tools to build in a way that honors our values and will support us toward our goals in the rough winds sure to come again.
This column ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on August 11, 2026, under Business Different.
